rush in our
seasons of bitter sorrow; listening from His glorified lips on the
throne to those same exalted themes of consolation which, for eighteen
hundred years, have to myriad, myriad mourners been like oil thrown on
the troubled sea. Jesus is with us! The Master is come! His presence
will extract sorrow from the bitterest cup, and make, as He did at
Bethany, a very home of bereavement and a burial scene to be "hallowed
ground!"

IV.

THE MESSENGER.

Is the absent Saviour not to be sought? Martha and Mary knew the
direction He had taken. The last time He had visited their home was at
the Feast of Dedication, during the season of winter, when the
palm-trees were bared of their leaves, and the voice of the turtle was
silent. Jesus, on that occasion, had to escape the vengeance of the Jews
in Jerusalem by a temporary retirement to the place where John first
baptized, near Enon, on the wooded banks of the Jordan. It must have
been to Him a spot and season of calm and grateful repose; a pleasing
transition from the rude hatred and heartless formalism which met Him in
the degenerate "City of Solemnities." The savour of the Baptist's name
and spirit seemed to linger around this sequestered region. John had
evidently prepared, by his faithful ministry, the way for a mightier
Preacher, for we read, as the result of the Saviour's present sojourn,
that "many believed on him there."

If we visit with hallowed emotion the places where first we learned to
love the Lord, to two at least of those who accompanied the Redeemer,
the region He now traversed must have been full of fragrant memories;
_there_ it was that Jesus had been first pointed out to them as the
"Lamb of God;" _there_ they first "beheld His glory, the glory as of the
only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and of truth." (John i. 28.)

On His way thither, on the present occasion, He most probably passed
through Bethany, and apprised His friends of His temporary absence.
Lazarus was then in his wonted vigour--no shadow of death had yet passed
over his brow; he doubtless parted with the Lord he loved happy at the
thought of ere long meeting again.

But soon all is changed. The hand of sickness unexpectedly lays him low.
At first there is no cause for anxiety. But soon the herald-symptoms of
danger and death gather fast and thick around his pillow; "his beauty
consumes away like a moth." The terrible possibility for the first time
flashes across the mi